In Conversation: Jennie Livingston

The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum
Published in
3 min readJan 16, 2015

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On January 17 and 18, the New York Jewish Film Festival will present Guest Selects: Jennie Livingston, with a special screening of Paris Is Burning on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release. Livingston has also selected two accompanying films that relate to Jewish culture: Alan J. Paluka’s Academy Award–winning Sophie’s Choice, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline; and Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott. Jennie Livingston will introduce all three films.

Paris Is Burning

The Jewish Museum: Your documentary Paris Is Burning received immediate critical acclaim upon its release in 1991, inspired pop culture figures like Madonna, and continues to play a key role in LGBT, AIDS, and other advocacy. How does it feel to have directed a film that remains influential 25 years later, and what made your film so iconic?

Jennie Livingston: I think to answer “what makes it so iconic” you’d have to ask just about anyone else but me. The filmmaker can’t really answer a question like that, although of course I can say the wit and wisdom of the people in the movie — and their great presence and talent as performers — is one of the things that made it good to have spent seven years making the film. All these years later, I still feel I’m blessed to have been able to meet and work with the people in the film, including the producers and crew. To know that the film still resonates for all kinds of audiences for all kinds of reasons is incredible. That’s what you want to have happen when you make a film; it’s one part of why you do it.

JM: Why did you choose Alan J Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice, and then Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove?

JL: I picked Sophie’s Choice because it was directed by my uncle, who was a mentor and a father figure. It’s a great film for so many reasons. It’s a brilliant adaptation of a novel. It’s an insightful portrait of the PTSD that many survivors experience. And it’s a portrait of the Holocaust, with three very strong characters: a woman escaping unspeakable trauma: her lover, a depressed American who understands her depths; and a young writer enamoured of the two of them. It also featured Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline’s breakout roles!

Since Sophie’s Choice was about World War II and such a serious drama, I thought it would be great to program another film that sees the war and its historical aftermath — the Bomb, the Cold War, the welcoming of ex-Nazis like Werner Von Braun into NASA — with irony and bleak humor. The film also features a great Jewish comic actor, Peter Sellers, in multiple roles. There’s nothing like Dr. Strangelove. Everyone needs to see it — repeatedly!

JM: Do you remain in touch with your documentary subjects from your seminal film?

JL: Too many of the people from the film have passed on, but as for the surviving people, not as much as I’d like. I just had a lovely time with James Goode, aka Junior Labeija, and Skylar-Baron King, aka Freddie Pendavis, along with editor Jonathan Oppenheim, at the Cinema Eye Awards, here in New York, where Paris is Burning won its Legacy Award. Hoping to have more reunions like that one.

JM: What are you currently working on?

JL: I’m in the middle of creating a memoir/essay film called Earth Camp One, which is about how I lost four family members in five years, as well as a hippie summer camp in the 1970s. The connection between the two is that when you’re young, you often want to leave your family, find different cultural markers. What happens when they leave you?

The film is about my own story, and it’s also a broad essay on how American culture views loss and impermanence. It includes animation about different conceptions of the afterlife. Oscar Wilde wrote, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” We’re afraid to talk, or even think, about the one thing we all share. The film will be funny, surprising, and hopefully, as with Paris is Burning, it’ll be thought-provoking.

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